I'm liking it, Ken. Seems very stable and locked in. The collective pre-comp was helping, but I had to use very high settings to get it to counter the pitch pump kick out I was seeing. And it never got rid of it entirely. I was using the ESC governor during this and I think it was just taking too long to catch up to the RPM loss, no matter what settings I used.
I did a test flight yesterday (video coming soon) after getting it repaired. I am now using the Ikon governor instead of the CC ESC gov. Much better handling of pitch pumps vis a vis the motor keeping up with things and resulting kick out. I'm going to reset the pre-comp settings to 0 and try again today to see how it performs that way. But from the ESC logs it looked like there was only a 50 RPM or so drop off on start of pitch pump and it reved to 50-75 over at the top. With CC gov I was seeing easily 100+RPM drop and 100+ overrev on the top.
I also am using 20mm shorter main blades now which can be contributing to the improvement.
I heard a slight bit of flutter during some of the maneuvers, similar to what I was hearing when the CC ESC gov gain was too high, but it was slight and didn't happen too often. And I couldn't find an indication of it in the esc logs on throttle input so it may be a result of the now too high tail pre-comp and the tail fluttering a bit as it compensates down.
But, back to the Ikon, I think it is a very solid FBL gyro. I've now used every feature of it except for the self leveling feature. I'm impressed with the amount of control it offers over settings and setup. Love the three flight mode/setup banks it provides. I haven't had any tail or cyclic control issues that I'd attribute to it. The tail kick out I've had has seemingly been primarily due to too slow to respond motor speed governing and perhaps undersized tail blades for the size of main blades that were on there, Ikon did what it could to compensate. And it only happened on aggressive pitch changes. Normal flight was absolutely fine.
I put it a step above 7200bx. And for the same price point, new. The SL feature has a spotty record, admittedly, but since it's the same cost as a 7200bx and less than half the cost of a HeliCommand/BavarianDemon, to me it is a fantastic value even if the SL doesn't end up working for me when I get around to testing it out.
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I'll try putting some more tail expo in. That or maybe see if I can dial in a wider deadband. I like the level of control the current expo setting has, but I do need a little more leeway at center. That or I may try cranking up the stick tension for rudder on the Tx to help keep me in line better. I've gotten a lot better about it since realizing what I was doing. But at the extremes of collective stick I do still tend to thumb in some left rudder.
